The Ending & Key Themes
“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” (Act 5, Scene 5)
After learning of Lady Macbeth’s death, Macbeth delivers his most famous soliloquy. Rather than grief, he expresses a profound nihilism: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time.”
The repetition of “tomorrow” and the slow, heavy rhythm create a sense of exhaustion and meaninglessness. Life, he concludes, is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” This speech reveals what Macbeth’s ambition has cost him: he has gained the throne but lost all capacity for feeling, meaning, and human connection.
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage” — Macbeth uses a metaphor from theatre itself. Life is reduced to a bad performance — brief, meaningless, and ultimately forgotten. This is the spiritual cost of his crimes.
The Prophecies Fulfilled
The witches’ equivocal prophecies now unravel. Malcolm orders his soldiers to cut branches from Birnam Wood and carry them as camouflage as they march toward Dunsinane. When a messenger reports that “the wood began to move,” Macbeth realises he has been deceived: “I pull in resolution, and begin / To doubt the equivocation of the fiend.”
Yet even as the prophecies collapse, Macbeth clings to his final reassurance: “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” He meets Macduff on the battlefield and boasts: “I bear a charmed life, which must not yield / To one of woman born.” But Macduff reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” — born by Caesarean section, and therefore not “of woman born” in the Jacobean sense.
When Macbeth learns the truth, he briefly despairs: “And be these juggling fiends no more believed.” But he refuses to surrender: “Yet I will try the last. Before my body / I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, / And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”
This final stand is significant. Macbeth dies fighting, not cowering. Shakespeare restores a trace of the “brave Macbeth” we met in Act 1. He is still a tyrant, but he faces death with courage. This complexity is deliberate — Shakespeare does not want a purely villainous Macbeth at the end, because the tragedy requires us to feel both condemnation and pity.
Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped” — born by Caesarean section. This fulfils the prophecy’s literal meaning while exposing its equivocation. Macbeth realises too late that the witches used truth to deceive him.
The Restoration of Order
Macduff kills Macbeth offstage and returns with his severed head. Malcolm is hailed as the rightful king. In his final speech, Malcolm promises to restore order: he will call home the exiles, reward the loyal, and punish the guilty. He refers to Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as “this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen.”
The play ends with the restoration of order. The rightful heir takes the throne, the tyrant is destroyed, and Scotland can begin to heal. For a Jacobean audience, this ending reinforced the importance of legitimate succession — a message that would have pleased James I, who traced his own lineage through Banquo.
Malcolm’s final verdict on Macbeth is reductive. “Butcher” strips away all of Macbeth’s complexity — his soliloquies, his agonised conscience, his recognition of right and wrong. This is a political judgement, not a literary one. Malcolm needs to simplify Macbeth into a villain to legitimise his own claim to the throne.
In the exam, you can challenge Malcolm’s description. Is Macbeth really just a “butcher”? The soliloquies show a man who understands the horror of what he does. Is Lady Macbeth really a “fiend”? Her sleepwalking shows a woman destroyed by the very guilt she once suppressed. Exploring this gap between Malcolm’s verdict and the audience’s experience is excellent analysis.
Key Themes: Summary for the Exam
Ambition is Macbeth’s hamartia. It begins as “horrible imaginings,” is inflamed by the prophecies and Lady Macbeth’s goading, and culminates in unrestrained tyranny. Key quotation: “Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself.” Shakespeare warns that ambition without moral restraint is self-destructive.
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair” establishes this from the opening line. The witches equivocate, Macbeth performs innocence, Lady Macbeth performs the perfect hostess, and the prophecies are literally true but designed to deceive. Duncan says “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face” — but does not follow his own warning.
Guilt manifests physically: the dagger hallucination, sleeplessness (“Macbeth does murder sleep”), the blood that “Neptune’s ocean” cannot wash, Banquo’s ghost, and Lady Macbeth’s obsessive hand-washing. Shakespeare shows that guilt cannot be suppressed — it surfaces in hallucinations, paranoia, and madness.
Duncan represents good kingship (generous, trusting, divinely sanctioned). Macbeth represents tyranny (paranoid, violent, illegitimate). Malcolm defines the “king-becoming graces.” The play argues that legitimate succession and divine sanction produce stability; usurpation produces chaos. This was a direct message to James I about the importance of the Stuart line.
Lady Macbeth equates masculinity with violence (“When you durst do it, then you were a man”). She rejects femininity (“unsex me here”). Macbeth accepts this definition. But Macduff offers an alternative: “I must also feel it as a man.” Shakespeare argues that true strength includes emotional honesty, not just the capacity for violence.